


Chronos

by Magical_Destiny



Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Episode: s02e13 Mizumono, Gen, Hannibal's emotions are fascinating, M/M, especially his heartbreak, rated for dark themes and for Hannibal's dark thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-22
Updated: 2016-05-22
Packaged: 2018-06-10 01:43:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6932806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Magical_Destiny/pseuds/Magical_Destiny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>God's greatest cruelty, Hannibal reflects, is not death. It is time – and being alone in its grip. Missing scene from Mizumono.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chronos

**Author's Note:**

> _Chronos: from Greek mythology, the personification of time._

The porcelain is beautiful when it shatters against the kitchen floor, the shards gleaming white as bone as they skitter and settle. The cracked handle is the only evidence of what the pieces once were: a flawless china teacup. Hannibal had opened the china cabinet and contemplated the neatly arranged cups for a long moment before plucking the one closest to the edge, holding it high, and letting it slide from his fingers. 

He hadn’t even needed the china tonight. He’d served lamb, and Will was the only guest at the table. But Will had left long ago and the kitchen was finally sparkling again, clean but for the glass of port on the butcher block and the broken pieces of porcelain scattered across the floor.

The smash of china had been almost musical against the hardwood, the resonant echoes of glass and wood making an impromptu instrument of the destruction. The present silence is equally resonant, if infinitely heavier. 

In that silence, he begins to discern layers. The hum of the refrigerator and the lights. The last drips escaping the faucet over the empty sink. The insistent clock hanging against the wall. The rhythmic _tick_ seems to thicken and fall more heavily against his mind as the silence stretches and thins. He sees back in time, back to the moment he’d hoped that Will would choose to abandon his planned betrayal.

_We could disappear now. Tonight._

He wonders how many times the clock ticked before Will’s face tightened and his lips parted to issue lies. 

Time coagulates, clotting like blood over a wound, and he sees the empty kitchen again. Takes a sip of the port and doesn’t taste it. 

Bedelia’s voice slides into his thoughts next, sinuous and insinuating, her words keeping time with the never-ending _tick tick tick_. 

_Trust is difficult for you, Hannibal._

And yet, for the first time in many years, he’d managed it.

He remembers the last time he’d trusted willingly. He remembers trusting that Mischa would always be present in his life. Until she’d died, of course.

Death is a great, hanging cloud over most every person he encounters. Those of his patients who suffer from anxiety fret endlessly over death’s approach, over its inevitability and unpredictability. They watch for it in every shadow and every pain. 

But Hannibal no more fears death than he fears the sunset. It will come at its own pace and with a captivating measure of beauty. What his patients always fail to understand is that God’s greatest cruelty is not death. 

It is _time._

Its inexorable march, despite pain, despite death.

Despite Hannibal. 

The sun still set the day Mischa's eyes went wide and vacant and her blood soaked into the ground to water the trees. It still rose again the following morning, to illuminate her murderer's fear, Hannibal's rage, and Chiyoh's cool determination. Still, death yields beauty, in Hannibal’s hands and in the hands of nature, repurposing every object into new life. 

Time, conversely, erodes, breaks, destroys. Releases nothing from its grip, gives nothing back. 

He can’t change what has been. Here, now, he can’t drive the scent of Freddie Lounds’ clinging perfume from his mind, or cut out all the beautiful, deceptive smiles Will has leveled at him over the dining room table, over the body of Randall Tier, over no barriers at all…

Will’s betrayal stings like a knife buried too deeply in his chest to be pulled free. He bleeds and twitches, all his efforts and interference meaningless. All his love come to nothing — an offering that was infinitely too little to satisfy Will Graham. 

Hannibal breathes, and the clock on the wall ticks. 

He has wished, sometimes, that time could reverse, in the years since Mischa’s heart went silent. That wrongs could be righted and mistakes undone. Death rolled away and discarded, yielding warmth and laughter and closeness instead of the pressing vacuum that constricts him now.

 

But time stops for no one and nothing. Will has smashed all Hannibal's delicately crafted hopes and burned the rooms he so meticulously prepared in his mind. Will stands, even now, on the piled shards and smoking ashes of Hannibal’s dearest wishes. And yet Will had smiled, said "I'll see you tomorrow," and seemed sorry to leave. Hannibal still breathes, despite the pain that is seeping out of him, black and hot as blood that hasn’t yet touched the cold air.

And the clock still ticks. 

No, the greatest burden of men is not death. God’s greatest cruelty is watching the creatures made in his image squirm beneath the crushing weight of the heartbreaks that fall on their backs and heads and hearts like the rubble of a church collapse. Until they are at last crushed, or expire after futile struggle in the chaos. God never rescues anyone from the merciless, ravaging grip of _time._

Hannibal is a death-dealer, and yet he has no power over the chief calamity of people's lives. He wonders if Will knows this. If Will would think better of him if he only understood that the worst possible fate is something far beyond Hannibal's abilities to pronounce on others. 

If he only knew that the worst fate is watching the clock tick in the empty silence when you are all that is left. 

Will must die. He knows it instinctively, like feeling the first shuddering hint of an earthquake. There is no escape, not for either of them. 

Of the two of them, he thinks Will is the fortunate one. How much better to slide away in the river of your mind, free of pain, of worry, of struggle. 

How much worse to be the one holding the knife, still standing when the labored breaths fall into silence, when the once-brilliant eyes close, when the fiery mind burns out. How much worse to be alone, to realize that you always have been and always will be.

He kneels to collect the porcelain shards from the floor with hands that are almost numb. It won't do to leave them here; he has dinner guests tomorrow night, after all. He doesn't feel the cut until blood slides warm and wet down the length of his thumb and drips against a jagged piece of white porcelain. He applies light pressure to the wound without looking, studies the way his glaring kitchen lights gleam against the bead of red instead. Silence presses against his back and his eyes, seizes his throat and chest. 

But the clock still ticks. 

**Author's Note:**

> Every time I write from Hannibal’s POV, I feel the overwhelming need to include a Moral Disclaimer. This is fiction and I’m being ridiculous, but I feel compelled to say that Hannibal’s thoughts about God are not my own, and I don’t endorse any of his opinions or feelings about anything ever. So, yeah, I’m disowning Hannibal’s morality. That should probably just be assumed, since he’s a literal serial killer, but I can’t help but clarify, lol. 
> 
> That said, he's just so sad in Mizumono. Poor thing. *clutches moral disclaimer like a security blanket*


End file.
